In collaboration with Medialab PradoConstant organised the worksession ’Objects in Common’ as the final event in a series that started in 2015 with ’Funcionamientos: Objects in Common and Diverse Bodies’ followed by ’Interactivos? Material Cultures in the digital age’ and ’Grigri Pixel: makers and energy in African cities’.
The series ’Objetos Comunes’ wants to explore “other ways of doing” such as design for functional diversity, situated digital manufacturing in for example African cities. It takes making ordinary/common objects as a point of departure.

During the week of the 7th to 12th of March 2016, 25 makers and thinkers have looked at the potential but also at the problems of sharing practices, processes of manufacturing and the documentation of physical objects. Taking both the permission to reproduce and the availability of source files as a given, there are still many questions to ask about the actual common-ness of digital objects and their potential physical life.

On this page you can find the raw archive of the notes that were taken during the worksession.

Call to collaborate in the project workshop Interactivos?’15: Material Cultures in the Digital Age, that will be carried out from December 2 to 16, 2015. Collaborators will participate in the production of the selected projects. The workshop is complete with a series of conferences and meetings and takes place in the framework of the project Common Objects, in cooperation with Constant vzw.

Free registration. Deadline: November 30, 2015.

Medialab-Prado offers free lodging to collaborators in youth hostels during the workshop (limited seating, shall on request and by order of registration).The last day to ask for a place is November 23.

When you want to make a printed circuit on a small scale, there are several methods to do this. One involves specific chemicals, which are not so great. In these tutorials, vinegar and hydrogen peroxide is used, which should be more environmentally friendly.

With a laserprinter you print your circuit on glossy paper, using the Toner transfer method.
The etching itself is the process where the printed circuit stays and the copper is etched of.Here you see the procedure explained in French, here in English.

—> Why would you print:
– The OpenKnit Wally 120 is an open hardware machine and in the true Floss spirit crowdprinting just makes sense.
– Our budget is very limited, so your 3D printed contribution will help to make this project happen.
– We will attribute all contributions in our window exhibition of 29/01/2015.

If you live in Brussels, come by at the opening on the 29th to have a drink – same address.

If you want to help build the OpenKnit machine, we will work on it on the Saturdays of February
Contact wendy atttt constantvzw dottt org

So, there are some glitches to make omxplayer loop with a script on a Raspberry Pi. When the script loops a very short file, it starts to crash quite quickly. I want to reproduce these errors and look for a solution later.

One potential solution was to make the files being played bigger. So I looked for some commandline magic of glueing the same file to a copy of itself. This mencoder code looks for all mp4 files and sticks them together.

I wanted to use Raspberry Pi’s to show a few .mp4 films, especially on old televisions & analog screens

Here’s a list of tips and tricks:

– Default (a reminder): login = pi, password = raspberry

– sudo just works – no password –> you need it to halt & to reboot (and lots more, of course)

– I installed the system with Noobs, the easy way to install Raspbian.
This did force hdmi to be default screen output. The analog video out just stayed dormant.
–> So I edited the config file:
$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt
Scroll down to the bottom and hash/comment out (add a #) the bottom part, added by Noobs, with regard to hdmi.

– To play the video’s, use omxplayer –> it is a mediaplayer adapted to the Raspberry Pi (semiclosed) Hardware.

Write it before the line exit 0, keeping that command at the end, then save the file and exit.
What you are doing here is hiding the terminal after 1 minute of inactivity. Just nudging a key on your keyboard revives it. If you add something/instructions/a command in the /etc/rc.local file, it launches it at start-up.

Ellentriek goes textile: liberating knitting machines Saturday 18th May 2013 10am – 6pm Pianofabriek Exhibition space Rue du Fortstraat 35, 1060 Brussels In the eighties and nineties electronic knitting machines were readily available. But it was never a simple task to knit an image, a drawing, photograph, text you designed yourself with it. You could […]

Makey Makey is a nice and fun Open Hardware project, developed by Mit researchers Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum.Â It’s an Arduino based project that could get started through crowdfunding. Basically you can turn any conductive surface into a sensor: bananas and other fruit/vegetables, cutlery, water, metal tools, conductive dough, human skin…When you connect to […]

Your copy machine, scanner or mobile phone has broken down and even the second hand shop is no longer interested in getting it fixed for sale. No worry, you can still find interesting bits and parts such as motors, lenses, microphones or amplifiers hidden within. In this workshop you will learn to dismantle broken electronic […]